Using a novel dataset that links socioeconomic background to future credit, postsecondary education, and federal student loan and grant records, we document that, even though it is not and cannot be used by credit agencies in assigning risk, background is a strong predictor of adult credit...

The initial years of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic fallout likely posed particular financial strain on U.S. households with children, who faced income disruptions from widespread jobs and hours cuts in addition to new childcare and instruction demands. One common expense for...

High and rising US wealth inequality underscores the need to revisit a perennial concern in policy circles: retirement preparedness. Our cross-cohort approach to studying retirement adequacy is based on relative wealth measures, meaning how the wealth distribution of one cohort compares to the...

Wealth inequality in the US is high and rising, but Social Security is generally not considered in those wealth measures. Social Security Wealth (SSW) is the present value of future benefits that an individual will receive less the present value of future taxes they will pay. When an individual...

We estimate the effect of student loan debt on subsequent homeownership in a uniquely constructed administrative dataset for a nationally representative cohort. We instrument for the amount of individual student debt using changes to the in-state tuition rate at public 4-year colleges in the...

The recent significant increase in student loan delinquencies has generated interest in understanding the key factors predicting the non-performance of these loans. However, despite the large size of the student loan market, existing analyses have been limited by data. This paper studies...